A BACKBENCH Labour city councillor is demanding to find out more about the financing of Coventry's Ricoh Arena.

Brian Patton has filed a series of questions he wants answered at the next full city council meeting tomorrow.

They will be put just before the full council is asked to endorse a Cabinet decision to offer two sums of money to the firm running the Arena.

The Cabinet wants to give Arena Coventry Ltd (ACL) a five-and-a-half month rent-free period worth £400,000 and offer it an "over-draft" of up to £1 million.

The move is to compensate ACL for the Arena not being fully ready when it was opened on August 19 in ways which affected the firm's business.

Snags included hot water not being available, hotel and catering services not being ready and the heating not working properly in parts of the complex.

Cllr Patton wants to know if the Sky Blues have in turn been offered a five and a half month rent-free period by ACL from their first match in August until the end of January.

He also wants to know if ACL has paid the council anything at all, when football matches and major concerts such as the Bryan Adams concert, have been held at the Arena.

And he's complaining that up to 11 key decisions about the Arena have been put to the council as matters of urgency - and so escaped being pored over by scrutiny boards.

He said: "There are now at least 111 occasions when a paper has been submitted either as a matter of urgency or straight to full council from Cabinet on this topic and which, as a consequence, also means that it could not be called in for scrutiny."

Cllr Patton, who has been a member of the Labour group since 1997, works for the probation service in Coventry and represents Henley ward.